Theodore Sizer, the influential educator, author, and founder of the Essential Schools ..., died in 2009 after a lengthy illness. In his final years, he completed what would be his final book, which his wife, Nancy Faust Sizer, promised to publish posthumously. That book, The New American High School, was published this year by Jossey-Bass.
BookMarks recently interviewed Faust Sizer, a former teacher, administrator, and the co-author on a number of books with her husband. She talked about the new book and her husband's final thoughts on school reform and what the "new" American high school could—or rather, should—look like.
Can you tell me a little bit about your role in creating The New American High School and the process involved in publishing it? I know you've co-authored books with your husband in the past, and I'm curious how all the pieces fit together for the book to come out now, almost four years after his passing.
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As I said in the book's introduction, Ted was a communicator. Toward the end of his life, and especially after we learned that the colon cancer had come back, he needed more than ever to keep in touch with others in the school reform world at least partly by writing this book.
At first, I worried that he had taken on a new project which would turn out to be burdensome, but then I realized that it was making him happy so we might as well treat it like his other books: lots of talk, "reports out" at the end of the day, and reading drafts as chapters were finished. Since we had worked together, especially on The Students Are Watching (Beacon Press, 1999), I knew how to "write like Ted," and occasionally I edited and even added, but that was subject to his approval—and to notions about grammar, which had been instilled in him by a fierce, loving teacher in 8th grade.
